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Unreal.hx is a plugin for Unreal Engine 4 that allows you to write code in the Haxe programming language. Haxe is a modern, high-level, type-safe programming language that offers high performance critical for game development.

Main Features

Haxe compiles directly to C++, for high runtime performance.

Full access to the entire Unreal C++ API – including delegates and lambdas.

Full support for UCLASS creation, subclassing, and Blueprints.

Haxe Features

Familiar C/Java-style syntax.

Memory management via garbage collection.

Strict type safety, with a powerful type inference engine.

Many modern features such as lambdas/closures, generics, abstract data types (GADT’s), reflection, metadata, and a powerful macro system for language extension.

Unreal Match 3 is a fully-featured match three-style game. Epic believes that this project can become “learning resource to help people learn how to make great games and apps”

Unreal Match 3 shows how you can use the popular engine to build optimized mobile products for a wide range of mobile devices. It also serves as a great example of how you can implement such features as achievements, analytics and in-app purchases in your game.

In comparison to modern consoles there are hundreds and thousands of various PC hardware configurations. Different graphics cards, central processors, memory etc. in all sizes, shapes and colors allow for an endless number of various hardware setups. Some of those are more powerful than others, and not every PC can play the latest game with graphics settings at their maximum level. Typically on the PC platform one can control different aspects of tuning those graphics settings: from the resolution of the monitor, via anti-aliasing techniques, to texture and shadow quality levels. All these settings allow to adapt the game to the actual performance of the hardware in use.

Modern game engines allow to set such things out of the box, and UE4 is no exception. Epic calls this “scalability”, and on top of those things mentioned before in Unreal you can also set quite a few more game and graphics aspects, such as post processing quality, effects quality, material quality, and others.

Well, in UE4 you basically have two main parts to tweak in terms of graphics settings. On one hand that is the so-called video mode, which is basically nothing else than the game screen resolution, as well as whether or not to render the game in full screen mode or in a (borderless) window. On the other hand you have those quality settings mentioned above and listed in detail in the UE4 scalability documentation.

Now the question is how one can set and change those values and parameters from within the game. The obvious way is to do so via in-game console commands. A simple web search will reveal those commands to you, for example as listed in the UE4 answer hub. However, using those console commands seems to be a bit cumbersome, and from our understanding that is also not the way Epic recommends. For example, you need to explicitly call those commands every time you start the game, which for sure is not what we want. Instead we want the engine itself to automatically do all those things for us. Thus let’s have a look at handling those graphics settings the proper way, and in particular: permanently!

Lauren Ridge and Richard Hinckley show you how to build a Match 3 game using C++ in combination with Blueprints. In this first part of the series, you’ll get an overview of the game – including how to design your project utilizing both C++ and Blueprints – as well as starting to implement some of the base classes.

Part 2 continues with Lauren Ridge and Ian Shadden showing you how to use the coded move type and tile type to do visual and audio effects in blueprints, and the combos accelerating tiles.

In the 3rd part, Lauren Ridge and Richard Hinckley show you how to add swipe control to the Match 3 game using both the mouse and touch input. This is a must see for any mobile game developers out there!Read the rest of this entry →